Concurrent detection of control flow errors by hybrid signature monitoring

In this paper, we present a new concurrent error-detection scheme by hybrid signature to the online detection of program memory and control flow errors caused by transient and intermittent faults. The proposed hybrid signature-monitoring technique combines the vertical signature with the horizontal signature schemes. We first develop a new vertical signature based on linear additive code whose signature length could be easily adjusted. The attribute of adjustable length in vertical signature offers the feasibility to integrate the vertical signature, horizontal signature, and length of block into a single signature word. The horizontal signature mechanism can compensate for the coverage degradation due to the reduction of vertical signature length and significantly decrease the error-detection latency as well. The extensive block-based bit-error simulation and hardware-based simulated fault injection experiment are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed technique: compared to the continuous signature monitoring (CSM) scheme, there are several notable enhancements accomplished in our work. One is the fault model used in our work is more realistic than the model employed in CSM. Another is the hardware-based experiments are performed so as to measure the design parameters more accurately. The final one is our scheme does not require being equipped with SEC-DED code in program memory in order to achieve the horizontal signatures if instruction bit correction is not an essential demand; as a result, our scheme is more flexible than CSM.